Alongside my studies, I serve as a graduate researcher at the Texas Robotics Institute, immersing myself in the complexities of autonomous systems. Contributing to the autonomous behavior development for our lab's Boston Dynamics Spot robot, I explore its potential as a member of a heterogeneous team of autonomous robots (3 diverse robots), with a current focus on multi-robot collaborative task planning using behavior trees and machine learning techniques. Some past successful robotics projects include autonomous radiation inspection, context-aware autonomous object identification and retrieval, RL policy training for manipulator control, and manipulator trajectory optimization.I have been incredibly fortunate. Originally from incredibly rural Northern New Mexico, my path has led me from a high school graduating class of 28 to impactful roles at various divisions across the DOE, and my current role as lead of a team of 4 other incredibly capable doctoral students at the institute. Through these experiences and others I've had since, I've been afforded the opportunity to bridge academia and real-world application, collaborating with experts and presenting functionality to world leaders.